John Lennon was on to something

What we have here, is a failure of imagination

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Good morning. Today, a very short Wednesday Wisdom due to the fact that I am in the Netherlands and very much involved with what is probably going to be the second-biggest event in my life so far: My daughter’s wedding! Thank you for your understanding.

I regularly run into situations that are completely sub-optimal, but where the people involved do not seem to be able to find a way out. The situations I am talking about might be technical in nature or they might not be. Examples of technical suboptimal situations abound: The company where every release is a nightmare of bugs and fixing forward, the team that has a huge ticket backlog that they cannot seem to get through, or the division that finds it impossible to agree on measurable quarterly OKRs. Non-technical suboptimal situations might be something like a person stuck in a job that they don’t like or someone who wants to achieve a better work/life balance but doesn’t know how.

When confronted with these, your first instinct is probably to give advice. When it comes to that advice, I trust your good intentions and your clarity of vision. I also trust that you have nothing but great advice to share, advice that worked in the past, advice that would help your mentee get out of the conundrum they are in. Also, I trust that most of the time that advice will be completely ignored.

Q: Why?
A: Because all advice is autobiographical!

Let that one sink in for a moment. Most of the time when you give advice, it will be of the nature: “If I were you, I would do <X>”. But guess what, they are not you! Advice only works well if the recipient is completely ready for it and then only when it is targeted to the recipient’s circumstances, values, and journey. In real life, it is almost impossible to find a situation like that without knowing an awful lot about the person you are trying to help. Even a question as simple as “I need to get from Boston to New York, how should I do that?” has different answers that depend on who you are and what you value. If I were me (and fortunately for everyone, I am), I’d take the train nine times out of ten because I value the relaxed slow progress of the train where I can sit on my bum for five hours and be delivered right in the heart of Manhattan, which is most commonly where I need to be. But if you are not me, you might be bored on that train ride, or not need to be in Manhattan, or despise the inherent socialism of public transport.

Whereas I am of the opinion that I am the public and therefore public transport must be my transport.

Advice works only if you know the person you are giving advice to very well so that you can target your advice to their needs. Most of the time, the only one who knows the person needing advice well enough to formulate that advice, is that person themselves! This is why good coaches, instead of giving advice, help you figure out the answer yourself. When push comes to shove, only you can give good advice to yourself.

Helping someone find an answer that is obvious to you is very hard. Most of us are very helpful, and when we meet someone who has a problem, we are often eager to help, especially if we think we have 20/20 vision into the situation and know exactly what needs to be done. The process of helping someone help themselves is long and cumbersome and not everyone has the stomach for it.

The most difficult problems are the ones where it is obvious to you how to get out of some problematic situation, but the person asking the question cannot even imagine that an answer exists or that a better situation is even attainable. That is what it means to be “stuck”; it is not that people are blocked on their chosen course of action, it is that they don’t know what to do because they cannot even imagine it is possible to solve this problem. When that happens, your job as the trusted person is to help the other person imagine a world where the problem is solved. Once you achieve that, what to do is often obvious.

There is a simple technique help imagine a better world: Ask the person you are trying to help to describe, in vivid detail, their life in a world where the problem they present to you has been solved solved. If someone is complaining that the weekly release is always a total mess, make them explain to you how the release would work in a world where that is not the case. Don’t tell them what to do to make the release not a mess, don’t ask them what they are proposing in order to fix the release! Instead, make them describe to you a wonderful world where the release is amazing.

Make sure to get as much detail in that description as possible, because you really need that world to come alive in their mind. What would the release day look like? At what time does the release start? What commands are they exactly giving to make the release happen? What would they wear on release day? Would they drink coffee during the release, if so what kind of coffee and where would they get it? It needs to become a full color 3D high resolution story with Dolby surround sound, because only then does the asker get a sufficiently accurate description of the wonderful world where the release is great in their mind.

If you are helping a friend that is stuck in their job and wants to make a career change, then ask her what a typical day in their new life would look like. What time do they get up? What will they do next? How do they get to work? What does the work they want to do actually look like? At what time will they start? What will their work entail? Who are the people they are working with? What will they do when the work day ends?

The crux is not to focus on the (possibly) hard way to get there; instead focus on how grand life will be once you are there. In order to solve any problem, you need to be able to imagine a world where the problem is solved. If you cannot vividly imagine that world, it is hard to know exactly where to go and to muster the energy to start the difficult journey to get there. If you are helping someone get out of a difficult situation and they are failing to take your good advice, that is not a failure of communication, it is a failure of imagination.

If they don’t even believe (really believe!) that a better world exists, why should they believe it is possible to get there? And without knowing what that world looks like, how would they know what to do to get there? People are typically quite innovative when it comes to achieving outcomes that they think exist and are possible. Once you have the destination solidly in your mind, figuring out how to get there is “just” logistics and people are good at that. They might still need help with some of the mechanics, but now you are in a place where advice actually works because it is about some smaller part of a journey that you both know they are on.

So, don’t give people the answer, help them find the answer for themselves. And start doing that by making them imagine a world where the problem is already solved. If they can do that, figuring out how to get there is easy.